HOW TO: Using dig(1) to Find DNS Time to Live (TTL) Values

Thursday, August 26, 2010

The dig(1) command is a handy DNS information and troubleshooting tool. It can be used to grab a host or domain’s TTL (time to live) values. This information can be critical to planning a DNS cut over, and how long to leave the old server on. In most circumstances I’d recommend running a low (5… Read more »

HOW TO: FreeBSD rc.d Script for Atlassian Confluence

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Below is a simple but effective script to bring Atlassian Confluence under control of FreeBSD’s rc.d script system. This is designed for Confluence in standalone configuration, ie; with its own dedicated Tomcat instance. This script allows you to enable Confluence, and when enabled it will start up with your server (after Apache HTTP and MySQL… Read more »

SOLVED: Apache HTTPd Crashes or Goes Offline Exactly At Midnight

Monday, August 9, 2010

After updating Apache httpd on a server running FreeBSD, it went offline at exactly midnight the following night, producing a log entry like this in httpd-errors: [Tue Aug 10 00:00:01 2010] [notice] SIGHUP received. Attempting to restart [Tue Aug 10 00:00:01 2010] [notice] seg fault or similar nasty error detected in the parent process The… Read more »

SOLVED: FreeBSD vmware-guestd6 Port Fails To Start

Thursday, August 5, 2010

I also to run across this error when working with certain FreeBSD VMs (FreeBSD 7 and 8.0, 8.1). I think the vmware-guestd6 port is missing a dependency. Here is the problem: $ /usr/local/etc/rc.d/vmware-guestd start /usr/local/etc/rc.d/vmware-guestd: WARNING: failed to start vmware_guestd Not too helpful and the logs don’t show anything either. If we try to manually… Read more »

SOLVED: FreeBSD vmware-guestd6 Port Install Error

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

I seem to run across this error when working with certain ESX based FreeBSD VMs (FreeBSD 7 and 8.0, 8.1). My suspicion is that the VMWare tools image that gets mounted when installing the guest tools is mismatching what the port expects, depending on the server’s copy of VMWare Tools. $ cd /usr/ports/emulators/vmware-guestd6 $ make… Read more »

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